KOffice, the KDE office suite, today released version 1.6 beta1. This release incorporates a number of new features, mainly from the Google Summer of Code projects, as well as a great number of bug fixes. It also signals the start of the feature freeze that always preceeds a release of a major new version, thus giving the developers exactly a month to fix outstanding bugs. We urge everybody that is interested in KOffice to install and test this version to make sure that the final
1.6 has a high quality. To see more details, you can look in theannouncement
or the
full changelog.

Emanuele Tamponi: A bezier curve tool with stroking using
brushes and a new outline selection tool for Krita.

Alfredo Beaumont: Major improvements to OpenDocument support for
KFormula.

The other SoC projects were integrated into KOffice 2.0, which is
being developed in parallel with 1.6 and will be released later in
2007.

Other noteworthy but smaller things in 1.6 Beta1 are tools for
perspective drawing in Krita, new filters in Krita, great speed
improvements in KSpread, Kugar Designer works again and countless
improvements in Kexi. To see some of them, look atJaroslaw Stanieks
blog

If Mandriva doesn't have pre-packaged binaries (rpm's), then you'll have to build it straight from the source code. Google might help, and asking around on the mandriva irc/forums may also help. goodluck.

If you are running an older release you should compile yourself or keep running updates until its released. Its best to wait for Mandriva rpm releases anyhow so you dont go accidentally breaking other things at the same time.

Most koffice applications are independent, you can use the environnement variable DO_NOT_COMPILE="kword kspread k..." before calling the configure script to select applications you don't want to build. And there is nothing new in karbon in 1.6, because the authors are doing a massive rewrite of the application for 2.0.

Krita is really looking very promising.
This perspective grid is very interesting and I can think of several uses for it quickly.
Now what Krita needs to make it a real killer app is implementing better "natural drawing" tools (something like openCanvas, mostly proper watercolors and a decent pencil simulation) and it'll be my drawing tool of choice without a second thought.
Go for it, you sure are improving!

I don't know OpenCanvas, but natural drawing tools are exactly what I want to work on. Unfortunately, you need a whole infrastructure setup before you can do that sort of thing. We're getting there, though.

OpenCanvas is a very nice painting application (mostly with a japanes community from what I have gather), with a quiet unique feature, you can record the strokes and drawing operation, and then replay them on a different computer. But, unfortunately there is no demo of it :'(

Uh, got late to reply to this...ahem.
Well, I was able to make it run in wine, sort of using the defaults in the lastest version. It wouldn't recognize pressure pressure from tablets(for that I use vmware player) but it's enough to check out or watch "replays".
An vmware setting is recommended, it runs perfectly and can use the tablet's pressure.
Best regards Mr.Rempt.